Escape!
 

After enduring a recent wave of pest programs, trojans, and viruses despite my many defensive procedures I have decided I've had enough of windows and I'm jumping boat to the Linux platform. I'll be honest, I'm a bit scared. I'm incrediblly familiar with the Windows environment and moving to something that's alien seems odd, and my last encounter with Mandrake wasn't exactly fun.

I think I'm going to maintain a windows partition for video games since linux happens to lack quite a few of my addictions. Unless of course wine's emulation is good enough to run a top of the line windows game on linux, but I doubt that.

Anyway, I've chosen SuSE as my distro and decided to try it on my laptop first. I'm installing 9.1 from the bootable install, and I was just wondering what should I expect? Any advice for newbs? Where are some FAQS? Where can I get software at? What's the necessary software I need?

Ty =)

hi Wind0wR3fuge, welcome to lq. for software, you'll want to look here

http://sourceforge.net/

http://freshmeat.net/

for support, well you've found lq, that's about the best support unit i've ever seen. suse also has it's own forums, you can find them at the suse site. one other link i'll provide for you is the equivalents table, which may make your conversion less painful, you can find it here

http://linuxshop.ru/linuxbegin/win-l...en/table.shtml

hope something here answers your ?'s.
good luck.

<edit>in reference to faq's have a look here

http://www.tldp.org/

plenty of reading there, again good luck.</edit>

Youve come to the right place. Expect a lot of configuring and playing around with text files using an editor to fix up things. I dont know much about suse but I hear its a good distro to start off on. You can get software online for free, yes I said for free. Just go to google and lookup what you need but be prepared to learn how to install software in the console and learning some commands. If youve ever played with DOS then you should be ok. Most distros come with almost all the software you need like media players, office programs, CDwriting programs, etc... but there are many other programs online that you can download.

PEACEDOG, thanks for the table! That's a whole lot of help!

Baja, I've had much experience with DOS, so I'm hoping this conversion isn't going to be too painful. From what I've read I guess that Slackware is the most "advanced" distro. Also, I've read many complaints about KDE and Flux as an alternative. I suppose, since this is all free, I'm just going to have to try it all out. Are front ends like KDE and Flux easy to install/uninstall without losing all your files?

Its not that slack is advanced it just dosnt do some things automatically like other distros. All linux Distros are about 90 percent the same. As far as installing Window Managers theres really nothing different than installing other Programs except you have to enable access to them in the menu. you dont really lose information it just gets put in another place so if you switch to a different window manager you just have to set it up to access the same files. KDE and Gnome load slow and have more features, Fluxbox is fast and you have to confiugure it to your liking. Most distros come with KDE, Gnome, and other window managers.

I would also recommend playing around with Knoppix (forgot the link, but you can google it) to get used to the feel of Linux, since there's no chance of messing up your existing install. Knoppix is a functional linux system, complete with a gui and many many apps, that boots from a CD and doesn't modify the existing system.

I second the comment about trying Knoppix first. Also, expect hardware configuration problems.

Suse will probably get the display and network correct, but sound card always seems to be an
issue. You might have problems with printers and usb/cameras, but maybe not.

In all cases, the problems are eminently fixable, if you're patient and willing to go up the Linux
learning curve to get all the stuff you took for granted running. Windows DOES do a good job
of hardware detection/configuration. That's probably the best thing about it. Linux supports as much or MORE hardware ... particularly really old stuff, but you have to learn how to find/install
drivers.

I'm still straddling both worlds after two years.